Posted on 06/17/2007 12:07:44 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
Summer of love: 40 years later
Hippie Hippie Shakedown: But where was love?
BY DAWN EDEN, Guest Columnist
LA Daily News
WHEN it comes to inappropriate names, "Summer of Love" has to be right up there with "Joy Division," the name the Nazis reportedly gave to the sections of concentration camps that housed the guards' sex slaves.
For one thing, it was not just a summer event. The countercultural happening that swept through San Francisco and beyond began with an April1967 planning announcement by concert promoter Chet Helms, aka Family Dog, creating the "Council for the Summer of Love."
It still goes on today in the burned-out minds of its rapidly fading survivors, remnants of the thousands of teens who ran away to find Love in San Francisco, only to wind up wasted on a street whose name sounds like hate.
Where, indeed, was the love in the San Francisco of Helms, the Diggers, the San Francisco Oracle, and other Summer of Love organizers, of whom so many have died young?
Helms would later boast on his Web site that the event "sowed the seeds of a compassionate idealism which still lives in the hearts of many of our own and subsequent generations." He pointed to the organizers' efforts to feed the runaways. Other Summer of Love chroniclers note that the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, founded in the summer of 1967, still help the needy today.
The irony is that there would have been no need to feed those runaways, nor to care for so many drug abusers, alcoholics and venereal-disease victims, had Helms - who succumbed to hepatitis C at 63 - and his compatriots not encouraged youths to flood San Francisco. And for what, exactly? Drugs, to be sure, and "free love" - "free," as opposed to the kind that costs money, apparently.
Thanks to the Pill and a counterculture that defined rebellion as annoying one's parents, thousands of youths became guinea pigs in a kind of mass experiment propagated by prurient Beat Generation relics such as Helms, Allen Ginsberg (died at 70, hepatitis and liver cancer) and Ken Kesey (died at 66, liver cancer). They were told that they would overcome the superficial consumerism in which they had been raised, reaching a higher spiritual level by uniting their minds to drugs and their bodies to willing takers. Instead, they themselves became products to be consumed - victimized by pushers, treated as sexual objects to be disposed of, or corrupted into predators.
It boggles the mind to think what the Summer of Love's sad victims could have accomplished if, rather than seeking to fulfill their own juvenile desires, they had aimed to create a true culture of love. Instead, in following their leaders' urging to do their own thing, they found themselves locked in a society that gave them all the restrictions of communal life - poverty, squalor, and social pressure to self-destruct - and few of the protections.
At the celebrated Be-Ins and Love-Ins, the mob ruled, while - like those Playboy cartoons of orgies where one person's orifice is indistinguishable from another's - the individual was subsumed.
Meanwhile, one corner of the culture, recognizing the counterculture's threat to the individual, composed a clarion call for the restoration of human dignity. A work in progress during the Summer of Love, published the following summer, it attacked those who, in pursuing solutions to overpopulation and other contemporary concerns, put forth "an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and his life." Instead, it urged world powers to develop a solution "which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society, and which respects and promotes true human values."
That's real love.
However, when those words of Pope John XXIII, quoted in Pope Paul VI's "Humanae Vitae," emerged in 1968, few of the hippies bothered to read them, let alone follow them as far as they led. All they knew was the five-word condensation of the encyclical that appeared on a popular poster, underneath an image of the Pope pointing his finger Uncle Sam-style: "The Pill Is a No-No."
Supporters of the hippies' objectives argue that they and future generations benefited from the dismantling of repressive Eisenhower-era values that restricted sex to marriage. Well, say what you will about a culture that presumed women found their highest fulfillment in motherhood, but one doesn't see many repressed housewives panhandling on modern-day Haight Street. One does see lost geriatric flower children with stringy hair and rotten teeth who contracepted or aborted the children who could have taken care of them in their old age.
Years after the Summer of Love's Bay Area invasion, a more moneyed class of Californians popularized a term that parallels what the hippies accomplished: garbage in/garbage out. The true measure of the success of the Love-In is the love that came out.
Today, the counterculture's victims are dying with few children to mourn them - at least, few who are willing to speak to parents who put their own desires ahead of their children's. It is the end of a long, bad trip.
Dawn Eden is director of the Cardinal Newman Society's Love and Responsibility Program. She is author of "The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On."
Much of today’s social ills can be traced directly to the 60’s. Most of the 60’s Flower Children were raised in traditional middle class homes and still had some sense of middle class values despite their rebellion. 40 years and a dependent Great Society later we have social chaos in too many quarters.
ALSO, it’s not as if brutal crime/gangs, etc. didn’t exist in the 50s and 60’s, but in those days there wasn’t 24/7 news, either.
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Nice try skippy.
I was born in '48, so I was 20 in '68 and not really a child ... almost 3 yrs (early out) of Army and sex, drugs, rock n' roll with mini (or less) skirts attacking my senses.
There was a serious barrage of anti-Americanism going on and it was easy for a curious and quasi-educated mind to think, "Yeah ... that sounds about right."
Travel was free, interesting and the nation opened up to anyone who wanted to hitch .. (twice from Boston to the west coast in two years)
Work was everywhere so money was no problem and the whole idea of being phoney or 'plastic' was anathema. A great sense of wanting to be honest and sincere was everywhere.
I don't think I would have had a better education than my real-life experiences from '65 to around the late '70's.
We are always looking through a glass darkly from our present position and only later can we parse the rights and wrongs of who and what we are or did.
Street people smell(ed), not 'hippies' ... we were waaayyy too into ourselves to be dirty.
We talked ... a lot .... to more people about more things face to face in a month than most people do today on the keyboard in a year today. Our minds were flooded by choice with everything imaginable and there was a reality of power, realizing most 'straights' had no clue.
I was not an actor on the stage ... I was the choreographer, and really enjoyed flitting from society to society with others that had no fear and bothered to know and care.
Sex was a tool, drugs were a tool and freedom too was a tool to acquire knowledge of real, live people and what they thought and did.
Nothing is forever and in the end .. it's all rather entropic, isn't it?
So now I'm pushin' sixty and I look back at my youth with envy and nostalgia, realizing I had been part of an amazing generation ...
and I'm thankful.
And thank you for that, soldier.
Hell, I've been laid off 4 times as old hippies cut defense budgets. I may be laid off again when Elaine Tauscher and the other old hippies on the House Armed Services Comittee cut my program.
For me at 39, the boomers just look to me like a bunch of dopes who traded their American Birthright for a handful of magic mushrooms.
You can’t go back. I’ll watch the video set.
Xer Ping
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.
That’s really good...
I had a lot of choices besides working for someone else and putting their kids through college.
Perhaps your anger might be more properly positioned if turned inward
Hippies may HAVE smelled but way too many of the young women like the ones you have up there in your post reflect that song lyric,”She has a body by Fischer-and a mind by Mattel.
I’m with you,dragnet!
The hippie movement had a LOT of faults which is why I was never a true believer.I saw through the hypocrisy,poseurs and scene makers.
Yet the music was a lot better,the crime rate was MUCH lower and there was hope in the air.It was a special time to be alive and I was glad I was there in the midst of it,warts and all.
Nah: I'm not a self-obsessed old hippy.
And they must have been terrible parents considering the generation that came after them.
I will give you ONE reason why I was attracted to the hippie counterculture:
In 1966.our community had dances at the local National Guard Armory.Some nights you would literally have to walk OVER dazed,drunk and bleeding bodies recovering from fights,alcohol poisoning and God knows what else.Groups of white punks would harass and intimidate you.The music was old school R and B and pop covers but the ambiance was brutal.
Later that year I started going to the hippie flavored shows at The Fillmore and Winterland.Mellow vibes and very friendly folk.Never a fight,at least till the speed freaks came onto the scene around 1968.You could dance the way you wanted and no one laughed at you.Conversations were free and without animosity.I loved it at its height.Best times of my life.
Sure,I look back now wondering what seeds the counterculture sowed and I am NOT happy about the Hillarys,The Kerrys and their ilk.But I sure dug The Jefferson Airplane belting out High Flying Bird as the crowd swayed and undulated to the “groovy”vibe!
Knarf-I feel ya,boy!
That's nice for you, but don't forget: for those of us too young to enjoy the "groovy vibe", all we got from the 60s was the Hillarys, The Kerrys and their ilk....
Well - you’ll find plenty of information at sites like FR that will delve into the “other side”, as Mr. Morrison enjoined us to do so eloquently.
I recognize that,Sith.You were left with the flotsam and jetsom after the love wave crested and we all came back down to Earth.
By the time the Summer of Love arrived,the hippie thing had pretty much peaked.It became a parody of itself.I moved on but many stayed around hoping to revive memories that were gone with the wind.
OMGosh. My 26 year old son went to that event. He’s driving home today.
I can’t wait to ask him if it was an old-hippie-fest! LOL
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